15 Ways to Increase Social Media Engagement Quickly

Social media engagement is an important metric to consider when building an online store. While most want to increase the size of their audience, they often fail to increase their social media engagement as well. When you engage with your followers on social media you can turn them from fans into customers. The time you devote to building relationships with your audience can lead to a higher number of sales, increase in customer loyalty, and higher positive reviews. In this article, you’ll learn the importance of social media engagement, how to grow your followers, how to increase social media engagement and more.

Importance of Social Media Engagement

Social media engagement helps you strengthen your customer relationships. When customers engage with your posts or send you a message on social media you’re presented with an opportunity to get to know your customers and build a relationship with them. Answer their questions, respond playfully when appropriate, and go above and beyond to offer excellent customer service.

Social media engagement also allows you to build customer loyalty. By helping your customers when they’re in need, building a relationship with them and offering a one of a kind customer experience, you’ll be able to increase your customer loyalty. Customers will trust your brand because you’ve answered their questions. They’ll fall in love with your brand because you’ve joked around with them, expressed your gratitude, and resolved their issues.

You’ll also increase your sales through social media engagement. By being active on social media and responding to customer posts, customers will feel confident making a purchase through your store. Even if there are negative comments on your page, if you respond positively and resolve the issue, you’ll still grow your sales. You can also grow your sales by recommending certain products when asked. Avoid making every response to a customer about your products though. The sales will come naturally.

How to Grow Your Social Media Following

If you want to increase social media engagement on your pages, you’ll need to grow your followers. The more real followers you have, the more engagement you’re likely to receive.

The most common and expensive way to grow your followers is to spend money on advertising. You can also buy ads to increase your followers on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. While you will grow your followers, they might not have the same level of commitment as someone who discovered your brand through an amazing product ad.

If you’re just starting out, you’ll also want to create unique content. You’ll want to have a mix of your own content and popular content you’ve found on the internet. If sharing someone else’s content always credit them on your page. When it comes to your own content, you can create quote graphics, funny gifs, viral videos, and more. Creating your content can take time to create. However, with long term effort, you’ll find that you eventually get more shares which will help you to grow your social media following.

You can also grow your followers by engaging with your customers. Being active on your social media pages will show that your page is worth following. By posting content regularly, communicating with your customers, people will naturally follow your page. You’ll also grow followers when you engage with customers who don’t necessarily follow you. They’ll be more likely to follow your page when you build relationships with them.

Having a consistent theme on your social media accounts can also increase your followers. People may be more likely to follow your page if they know what they can expect. A theme can be the type of content you share (funny, inspirational) or the look of your content (minimalist, colorful). How do you want your brand to be perceived by others? Focus on creating a consistent personality and voice for your content.

Collaborations with other brands can also help grow your followers. You’ll want to collaborate with other brands who have a similar audience but sell different types of products. For example, if you sell jewelry you could collaborate with another brand that sells accessories like scarves. You’ll be able to tap into each other’s audiences to grow your followers. A collaboration might include a contest, giveaway, blog post promoting their products, or post on social media.

Social Media Tools to Boost Engagement

Buffer: Buffer is a great tool for building and tracking social media engagement. The tool allows you to automate your posts at various times. You can post up to 10 posts at a time for free, making it a great tool for new entrepreneurs. Hashtags can be added to posts and you can also tag relevant brands within Buffer. The tool uses a link shortener to allow you a higher word count. You can also add graphics and images to your post. The best part about Buffer is that it allows you to track your social media engagement. You’ll be able to see how many likes, retweets, mentions and click throughs your posts get.

Canva: Canva is one of the best social media tools around. It allows you to create your own unique content for each social network based on the correct dimensions. The tool acts like a user-friendly version of Photoshop. You’ll be able to drag, drop, and modify graphics anyway you like. This is a great tool for social media engagement as having your own content allows you to share relevant content with your audience (which can help boost social media engagement). It also helps give you a competitive advantage as people will credit you when they share your content.

IFTTT: IFTTT is a great social media tool that allows you to automate more of your business. If you post something on Facebook, you can set triggers so that IFTTT reposts the content on your other social media accounts. This is a great tool for solopreneurs who may not have the time to craft and automate unique content for each platform. By posting regularly on different social networks, you’ll likely increase social media engagement.

Sniply: Sniply is a tool that simplifies content curation. You can share other people’s articles for your social media account. The best thing about this tool is that a link back to your website will appear on the article page to drive more traffic back to your store. Because you’re sharing other people’s content, you’ll be able to add more posts to your social media. This will help you grow your followers which will indirectly help grow your social media engagement. By posting regularly you’ll have a better chance of engaging your audience.

15 Ways to Increase Social Media Engagement

Post Content Worth Engaging With

If you want to increase social media engagement, you need to create content that people can engage with. It could be a poll on Twitter, a video people can relate to, a graphic that makes people laugh, or a product photo that encourages someone to tag their friends. Choose to post content that will receive a positive reaction from people. Is your post about something beautiful, inspiring, funny, or relatable? Choose content that’ll drive an emotional response from people. As you’re building a store avoid posting things that’ll make people angry at your brand such as sensitive issues.

Respond to All Comments

To increase social media engagement, you need to be social too. When customers send you a message or leave a comment on a post, they’re giving you an opportunity to talk to them. Whether they leave a positive or negative message, you should be responding to each customer. You can show appreciation for positive messages and suggest a resolution for negative ones. The only time you wouldn’t respond to a post is if someone tags their friend as they’re not directly engaging with you.

Encourage Readers to Comment, Like, and Share

When you create a post always add a call to action at the end of it. You can ask people to like, comment, and share with their friends. People are more likely to share a post if you ask them to.

Start a Facebook Group

Facebook groups are a great way to increase social media engagement. Groups are generally more social than pages as members are free to post their questions at anytime. By having a group, you can allow your customers to communicate with each other. This will allow them to get to know other people in their niche. You should also be active in your own community and strengthen your relationships with others. You’ll should moderate posts within the group to avoid spam. But also to ensure that the group remains valuable to its community.

Run Contests and Giveaways

The easiest way you can increase social media engagement is to run contests and giveaways. You can ask people to take certain actions such as visiting a landing page on your website (that you can retarget). You can use tools like Rafflecopter which you can use to grow your social media following and increase social media engagement as contest requirements. You’ll need to give a prize to a winner but the prize can be expensed by your business.

Use Images in Every Post

According to Buffer, tweets that include images tend to gain 150% more retweets than tweets that don’t include them. Images capture more attention when scrolling through newsfeeds than just plain text. Adding relevant images to your post will help encourage more social media engagement.

Get More Followers

Having followers will surely help you increase social media engagement. Those with under 100 followers will receive less engagement overall than brands with tens of thousands. Social media engagement can be a numbers game. If you have a bigger audience, you’ll be more likely to have a higher level of engagement on your posts. You’ll still need to ensure that the quality of your social media posts is high. But it’s a lot easier to receive post engagement when you have a big audience.

Ask a Question

When you post on social media, an easy way to engage your fans is to ask a question. Asking a relevant but fun question is a great way to get your customers to leave a comment on your post. For example, you can create a post that compares two different dresses and ask ‘Which would you rather wear on date night?’ This allows you to incorporate your product into the question while still being playful with your audience.

Post Multiple Times Daily

To increase social media engagement, you’ll need to post regularly on your pages. On average, 2-3 posts per platform per day will help you build an engaged audience. If you post too much, you may annoy your audience, which can result in an unfollow. You’ll also want to post at the best times. On average, between 1-3pm is the best time to post on most social networks.

Optimize Your Headlines for Engagement

Your headlines should be honest yet compelling. Whether you’re trying to drive traffic back to your blog post or product page, you should use a tool like CoSchedule to create a captivating headline. CoSchedule allows you to optimize your headlines to encourage engagement such as click through. You’ll receive a score for your headline and can make changes to increase your score. Aim for a score above 70.

Share Content That’s Relevant to Your Audience

Who are your customers? What are their interests? What types of posts do they prefer? How do they consume information? Would they prefer videos, blog content, or image posts? Focus on creating content your customer would enjoy. You’ll likely need to experiment with different types of content to see which gets the most engagement. If you notice that videos perform well on your fan pages, then create more video content.

Use Two Attention Grabbing Words at the Beginning of a Post

When I first started managing social media pages, I experimented a lot. I noticed that when I capitalized two important words before a post, I generally received higher engagement. For example, if I was running a giveaway or contest I would write: ‘GIVEAWAY ALERT:’ or ‘CONTEST ALERT.’

Go Above and Beyond in Your Interactions

Brands like Netflix crush their social media engagement by interacting with their fans. They’ll regularly joke around with them. For example, on their Canada Day post, all of their responses to their fans made Canadian references such as using the word eh. Each customer response was different. So avoid doing canned responses with your customers. If you routinely offer a fun and enjoyable customer experience on your pages you’ll increase social media engagement.

Host a Weekly Twitter Chat

Another way to increase social media engagement is to host weekly Twitter chats. You’ll want to create a hashtag for your chat and let your audience know about it. The weekly chats serve as a real-time way to interact with your customers. Many Twitter chats include giveaways for responding to questions to entice higher levels of social media engagement. The Twitter chat hashtag can trend if you get a high number of tweets using the hashtag during that time.

Use Emojis

According to OPUSFidelis, using emoticons can increase social media engagement. Each emoticon can increase engagement by a different amount. A smiley face can boost interaction by 25% whereas a grimacing emoticon can increase engagement by 138%. Those who use emoticons in their social media posts tend to see an increase in likes, comments, and shares.

What steps have you taken for your brand to increase social media engagement? Do you regularly get likes, comments, and shares on your posts? Let us know your social media tips in the comments below!

Nicole Martins Ferreira

Nicole Martins Ferreira

Nicole Martins Ferreira is a content marketer at Oberlo and experienced ecommerce entrepreneur. She’s been building online stores since 2013 and sharing her secrets with Oberlo users since 2016. Follow Nicole on Twitter at @NicoleMarFer.

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